"To His Coy Mistress"

"To His Coy Mistress" is a poem of seduction offered as an argument to the lady of the title. Now, he offers an argument as to why she should submit to him, and he uses an extended metaphor to describe the cours of a life, to show how short it truly is, and so to argue that time passes quickly and so that the lovers should get together while they may. The woman is "coy" because she has been resisting the advances of the poet, and her coyness is a crime to him because he wishes to make love to her and she is resisting him. Marvell extends this situation through numerous references to events in history and so creates a sense of time as a continuing and rapidly-moving element in both life and the poem.

The speaker is trying to persuade his mistress to let him make love to her. Her age is not clear except that she is young, probably in her twenties, with her beauty at its b

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us what we have. From the first, this act is linked with nature: "Iaponica/ Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens" (4-5). There are two speakers, the first being the trainee in the opening stanza, and the other being the trainer who describes what each trainee has and does not have as he names the parts. The first speaker returns in the last stanza, and in both the first and last stanza, the speaker makes reference to the garden and the bees in the gardens and so brings in the natural world as a contrast. The poem is not a dialogue, however, in that the trainee is speaking to the reader only and not to the trainer, who in turn speaks to the trainee and not directly to the reader. The garden imagery usually indicates a reference to nature in the form of the garden and greenery, but it also usually includes a reference to the Garden of Eden specifically, which rerpesents a return to innocence. War can be considered part of the Fall of Man, and The Fall of Man refers to the events in the Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The story is told in Genesis as the serpent seduces Eve into tasting the forbidden fruit: "In this account everything hinges on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Coy Mistress, Dark Lady, Garden Eden, Kenneth Burke, Naming Names, Spenser Sidney, Adam Eve, Chicago Hackett, Conversion Jews, Iaponica/ Glistens, garden eden, truth love, stanza poet, metaphysical poetry, military training, poem speaker, poetry seen, romantic poetry, plot land, nature garden,
Approximate Word count = 2570
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)